Slack suffers global outage as millions work from home

Workplace communication platform Slack suffered a global outage on Wednesday morning, cutting potentially millions of users off from messaging and collaborating with their colleagues while working from home.

The outage was first acknowledged by Slack just before 10am AEST, in a message on its status dashboard indicating users had "reported general performance issues such message sending failures and timeouts".

Slack experienced an outage for more than two hours on Wednesday.Credit:Bloomberg

Shortly after it followed up with a message saying users were unable to connect to Slack, and an investigation had begun. By 10.43am the dashboard indicated some users may be seeing improvements, and by 12.26pm — more than two hours after the outage began — another message confirmed full service had been restored.

The outage appeared to affect users globally, though the cause is unclear.

With the COVID-19 pandemic forcing many to work from home, collaboration tools such as Slack and Microsoft Teams have seen incredible growth in demand. While Slack doen't regularly reveal total user numbers, it reported in late March that it was seeing as many as 12.5 million concurrent users on its platform.